Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
Walter BagehotRead
So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Believers often desire to punish differing opinions, despite knowing it's unwise or wrong.
In this quote, Walter Bagehot reflects on the tendency of individuals who hold strong beliefs to seek punishment for views that contradict their own. Even when their rational judgment may caution against it, and their conscience may tell them it's unjust, the emotional drive to enforce conformity can overpower reason and morality.
Themes
BeliefPunishmentOpinionsWisdomConscience
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the importance of open dialogue, one could quote Bagehot to illustrate the dangers of dogmatism.
More from Walter Bagehot
All quotes →It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
Walter BagehotRead
War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.
Walter BagehotRead
Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.
Walter BagehotRead
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
Walter BagehotRead
The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
Walter BagehotRead
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Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
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What kind of guilt comes from being true to yourself but not to others?. As we have seen, being true to yourself may at times intrinsically and necessarily be in conflict with being true to others.
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